Twain’s harrowing upbringing

Shania Twain began writing songs to escape a nightmarish childhood, said Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian (U.K.). She has made an estimated $350 million as a performer, but the country singer grew up poor and abused in Ontario, Canada. Her mother, Sharon, suffered from chronic depression, and her stepfather, Jerry, was mentally ill and an alcoholic. Twain, now 52, would go to sleep worried about her father killing her mother. In a home filled with violence but “nothing to eat,” music was the only escape. By age 8 she was performing in bars to help pay the family’s bills. When her stepfather began sexually abusing her, she endured it, knowing that if she reported him “we’d all get separated, and I just couldn’t bear that.” She eventually left to record music in Nashville and was on the verge of a breakthrough in 1987 when she learned that her parents had died in a car crash. She moved back to Ontario and spent the next six years raising her four siblings. “When you add shock to grief, it does crazy things to your mind,” Twain says. As an adult, she’s dealt with more adversity: Her husband and producer left her for her best friend, and she suffered vocal cord paralysis that almost ended her career. The survival skills she learned in childhood, she says, “really helped me through.”